Friday, September 4, 2015

Hacienda Nápoles: The Home of a Former Drug Lord, Now a Theme Park

About 180 km south-east of Medellin, is Puerto Triunfo, a small
municipality and town in the department of Antioquia. It was here that
Colombia’s notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar acquired a vast tract of
land in 1978, and built a luxurious and sprawling estate, the kind that
you would expect from the world’s richest drug dealer who ran the most
successful cocaine cartel in history worth some $25 billion. Escobar
named his home Hacienda Napoles which means “Naples Estate” in Spanish.
The
Hacienda Napoles covers nearly 20 km of land and includes a private
zoo, numerous artificial lakes, a cart racing track, a private airport,
and even a bullring where he reportedly machine-gunned bulls, all
constructed on a grand and luxurious scale. It is from Hacienda Napoles
that Pablo Escobar carried out all his illegal and criminal activities
such as shipping out large cartels of drugs, and planning the many
massacres and crimes that shook the nation.

His private zoo was stocked with many kinds of animals such as
giraffes, ostriches, elephants, hippopotamuses, ponies, antelope, and
exotic birds, which he brought from different places. He built six
life-size concrete dinosaurs and proudly showed off the single-engine
private plane that had flown his first cocaine shipments. The ranch also
had a large collection of old and luxurious cars and bikes. He himself
lived in a Spanish colonial villa.
After Pablo Escobar was shot
dead in 1993 by the Colombian police, his family tried to gain control
of Hacienda Napoles but the Colombian government seized the property.
Most of the animals were given away to other zoos as it was too
expensive to maintain them. There are still a few bison, zebras, a rare
goat, one ostrich and at least a few dozen hippopotamuses that roam
through the estate. The hippo population has flourished since Escobar's
death and increased in size to an estimated 50 or 60 from the original
four that he bought from San Diego Zoo in 1981. Most live in the lake at
the park but a few of them have escaped the enclosure and moved to the
nearby river.
In 2008, the Colombian government handed the
property over to a management company that turned it into a theme park
called Parque Tematico Hacienda Napoles (Hacienda Napoles Theme Park).
There is a museum in the middle of the park entirely dedicated to the
drug lord. His classic car collection, which was destroyed by his rival
when they bombed his Medellín home, is also there to see. The house,
which was torn apart by locals in search of Pablo's hidden treasures
after the news of his death reached them, has been left in pretty much
the same state of disrepair.
Nearly 50,000 tourists is said to visit the place annually.